Supermassive black hole from early universe is farthest ever found

Astronomers be subjected to discovered a super-size black hole harkening back to almost the daybreak of creation.

It’s the farthest black hole ever found.

A team led by the Carnegie Observatories’ Eduardo Banados reported in the tabloid Nature on Wednesday that the black hole lies in a quasar dating to 690 million years of the Big Bang. That means the light from this quasar has been going our way for more than 13 billion years.

Banados said the quasar affords a unique baby picture of the universe, when it was just 5 percent of its prevailing age.

It would be like seeing photos of a 50-year-old man when he was two-and-a-half years old, according to Banados.

«This determining opens up an exciting new window to understand the early universe,» he said in an email from Pasadena, California.

Quasars are incredibly fluorescent objects deep in the cosmos, powered by black holes devouring the whole shebang around them. That makes them perfect candidates for unraveling the puzzles of the earliest cosmic times.

The black hole in this newest, most inaccessible quasar is 800 million times the mass of our sun.

Much bigger bad holes are out there, but none so far away — at least among those set up so far. These larger black holes have had more time to reach in the hearts of galaxies since the Big Bang, compared with the young one only just observed.

«The new quasar is itself one of the first galaxies, and yet it already harbors a behemoth embargo hole as massive as others in the present-day universe,» co-author Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory articulate in a statement.

An artist’s concept of the most distant supermassive black niche ever seen is surrounded by neutral hydrogen, indicating that it is from the interval called the epoch of reionization, when the universe’s first light authorities turned on. ( Robin Dienel, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Principles)

Around the time of this newest quasar, the universe was emerging from a called Dark Ages. Stars and galaxies were first appearing and their emanation ionizing the surrounding hydrogen gas to illuminate the cosmos.

Banados suspects there are profuse examples like this out there, between 20 and 100.

«The newfound quasar is so specific and evolved that I would be surprised if this was the first quasar for ever formed,» Banados said. «The universe is enormous and searching for these darned rare objects is like looking for the needle in the haystack.»

Only one other quasar has been ground in this ultra-distant category, despite extensive scanning. This newest quasar worsts that previous record-holder by about 60 million years.

Quietly on the lookout, astronomers are uncertain how close they’ll get to the actual beginning of every so often, 13.8 billion years ago.

Banados and his team used the Carnegie’s Magellan crushes in Chile, supported by observatories in Hawaii, the American Southwest and the French Alps.